The Space Shuttle
5 Jan 1972 – 21 Jul 2011, 09:57:5455 items
spaceusaThirty years, five orbiters, 135 missions
From Nixon’s go-ahead in 1972 and Enterprise’s glide tests over the Mojave to the last wheel stop in Florida on 21 July 2011. The shuttle launched Hubble, docked with Mir, built most of the International Space Station and carried people from sixteen countries. Two orbiters and fourteen astronauts were lost.
The fleet
Columbia: 28 missions, 1981–2003
Challenger: 10 missions, 1983–1986
Discovery: 39 missions, 1984–2011
Atlantis: 33 missions, 1985–2011
Endeavour: 25 missions, 1992–2011
How to read it
Each orbiter is a band from its first launch to its last landing, and the two stand-downs after the losses are bands of their own. Zoom in on three days to the second: STS-1 in April 1981, Challenger’s 73 seconds on 28 January 1986, and Columbia’s re-entry over the American South-West on 1 February 2003.
Filter by orbiters, firsts, losses, investigations, space stations or space telescopes. Times are UTC; the notes give the local clock time where it matters.
What it cost
In 1972 NASA put development at about $5.5 billion. Roger Pielke Jr. and Radford Byerly, adding up NASA’s budgets in Nature (2011), counted more than $192 billion in 2010 dollars spent from 1971 to 2010: about $1.5 billion a launch over the programme’s life, and $1.2 billion in the operational years from 1982.
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled. — Richard Feynman, Rogers Commission report, Appendix F
Items
Nixon approves the Space Shuttle
- ≈ 4 years, 8 months
Enterprise rolls out
Enterprise flies free
- ≈ 3 years, 5 months
STS-1: Columbia lifts off
STS-1 lands on Rogers Dry Lake
STS-3 lands at White Sands
Sally Ride, first American woman in space
Guion Bluford, first African American in space
Ulf Merbold, Spacelab’s first flight
McCandless flies untethered
First landing in Florida
Enterprise on Vandenberg’s SLC-6
Thiokol’s engineers argue against launching
Challenger lifts off
Black smoke at the right booster’s aft joint
Flame breaks through the joint
“Go at throttle up”
Challenger breaks apart
Reagan speaks to the nation
Feynman’s glass of ice water
STS-26: Discovery returns to flight
Hubble is deployed
Three spacewalkers catch Intelsat VI
Atlantis docks with Mir
John Glenn flies again
Eileen Collins commands; Chandra goes up
Foam strikes the left wing
Request to photograph the wing is cancelled
Entry interface
Left-wing sensors drop out
Last words from Columbia
A foam block punches a hole in a wing
Bush sets the shuttle’s retirement
STS-114: return to flight
STS-125: last visit to Hubble
STS-135: the last launch
Wheel stop